Overview

Marcin Kleczynski has a mission. A mission, that to many, may seem impossible—he wants to rid the world of malware.

Marcin’s personal mission goes back to 2004, when he picked up a nasty malware infection while cruising the Internet in search of video games. Despite having a popular paid antivirus program in place and working as a computer tech after school, it took more than three days searching the Internet and consulting with other people on security forums to find a solution to his problem. During that search Marcin came to the conclusion that there was a lot of new malware out there and current antivirus programs couldn’t handle it. So, he set out to build the world a better malware fighter. He taught himself code and eventually engineered a small but highly effective anti-malware tool, the precursor to Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, that quickly became popular in the security community.

Today, Malwarebytes is headquartered in California with offices in Europe, and a global team of threat researchers and security experts. This year, Malwarebytes expanded endeavors throughout Asia, initially focused on driving business in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand with efforts in China and Japan to follow, with additional operations launched in the Middle East.

Marcin uses his experience as a successful tech entrepreneur to inspire the next generation of computer scientists. He believes that encouraging high school students to pursue cybersecurity as a career choice will help address this critical shortage of cybersecurity professionals. In 2016, he spoke with Pioneer High School on starting a business in high school and what motivated them to believe no matter what. Additionally, he gave a TEDx talk on the ups and downs of starting a business while attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.